Redistributing Facts
Here’s a cool website about what redistricting might mean for you during next year’s election.
Gary Hart: President stuck between rock and a hard place
Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart makes a good point on his blog about how the President has control of the national security, yet he cannot escape it. Perhaps Obama can turn the tide?
It has been powerfully argued that the national security state, inaugurated in 1947 and greatly expanded ever since, created a more powerful national executive than our Founders anticipated and that this power structure now both handcuffs the president and compels him to become a virtual monomaniacal figure. [“Entangled Giant,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2009, Gary Wills]
The National Security Act of 1947 was the statutory basis for defining America’s role in the world post-World War II and for conducting the Cold War. It established a new Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and the United States Air Force as a new military service. For more than six decades, it has also been the source of authority for the president as commander-in-chief.
Despite the fact that our Constitution, Article I, section 8, gives Congress solely the power to “provide for the common defense” and “declare War,” it is not accidental that no declaration of war has been authorized since 1941, even while we waged war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens of other venues. Presidents now decide when and where we will wage war.
Gary Wills bolsters his provocative argument by listing all of the George W. Bush “security” measures quietly adopted and approved by the new Obama administration. His argument is not that President Obama was a closet neo-conservative who managed to fool the voters. Rather, he says, the national security state has become a kind of powerful prison with the president as warden. He has authority over it, but he cannot escape it.
HuffPost’s Malcolm Glenn praises Obama’s support of Michael Bennett
Glenn wrote that Sen. Bennett’s re-election race for 2010 is flourishing with the recent endorsement from President Obama and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, leaving former Colorado House of Representatives speaker Andrew Romanoff in the proverbial dust. He even goes as far as slamming Romanoff:
Romanoff was an early choice for progressives following former Senator Ken Salazar’s appointment as Interior Secretary last year, and the disappointment was palpable when the low-profile former school superintendent got the head-scratching nod from Governor Bill Ritter.
But what’s there to love on the left from Romanoff? Idealists make up the base in Denver’s Democratic political circles, but is a career politician really the man the state’s progressives think can be their biggest champion?
Wade Norris of SquareState.net had something to say about that:
I don’t know where to begin, except to say, as I have journeyed around the state to rural Colorado – it has been apparent that Andrew Romanoff’s support does not reside alone in “Denver’s Democratic circles”. Saying that AR owes his strength to idealists in Denver shows a lack of understanding about the Democratic Party of Colorado.
I know Andrew Romanoff. He once spent an hour on a Friday night explaining to me the intricacies of TABOR (Taxpayers’ Bill Of Rights) and how it would affect higher education funding for an article I was writing for the college newspaper. I’ve followed his campaign and I think he has some great accomplishments under his belt. I simply don’t know Bennett, but he seems to have a lot of support, which could have more to do with inner politics than his strength as a candidate, or that he’s raising more money. It will be an interesting race.
Free Press advocates for reform, not bailouts for newspapers
Free Press, a media reform outlet, in a press statement, called on President Obama to provide leadership to help reform the press in the United States, but without bailouts. Craig Aaron, senior program director of Free Press:
“President Obama’s leadership is needed to put the future of journalism on the national agenda. Now is not the time for bailouts, but it is a moment for forward-looking policies that will support local and diverse media ownership, encourage experiments and innovations, and invest in a world-class public media system. Our concern should not be for newspapers — or not just newspapers — but rather for newsrooms and keeping reporters on the beat.”
Obama said to a group of newspaper editors Friday:
“Journalistic integrity, you know, fact-based reporting, serious investigative reporting, how to retain those ethics in all these different new media and how to make sure that it’s paid for, is really a challenge,” President Obama told editors from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade. “But it’s something that I think is absolutely critical to the health of our democracy.”
Leading U.S. Socialist Says Obama is Not One of Them
I know this is kind of old news, but for those who haven’t heard:
Frank Llewellyn, the National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization, has said in an interview with Politics Daily that President Obama is not “any kind of socialist at all,” calling him a “market” guy.
“He’s not challenging the power of the corporations,” Llewellyn added. “The banking reforms that have been suggested are not particularly far reaching. He says we must have room for innovation, but we had innovation — look where it got us. So I just…I can’t..I mean it’s laugh out loud, really.”
Llewellyn offered his belief that Republicans have historically called opponents “socialists” in order to stop moderate reforms, and that the new stickiness of the Obama/socialist association is one part misinformation, one part ignorance. “The Republicans are doing the same thing they did when Roosevelt was president — confusing somebody who is trying to save capitalism from itself with somebody who is trying to destroy it. (Obama) is not trying to destroy capitalism.”
Llewellyn further added about a single payer health care system:
“We’ve always been single payer people. We were for single payer back when Clinton proposed health care reform, and we’ve done a lot of work to educate people about that. But single payer is not what I would call a “socialized” medical system. It doesn’t make health care professionals employees of a government-run entity; it just says who is going to write the check.”
He added further about socialism:
“They [Republicans] always use socialism to try to defeat moderate reforms…just because something is government run doesn’t mean it’s socialist. I’ve never heard anybody say we have a socialist army.”
Examining health care numbers
Republican senators and congressmen and women could be taken more seriously on healthcare reform if they did more than just boo and shout out “you lie!” at a presidential address. Some of their cohorts on the Web seem to be making the case for them, but their points don’t seem to be entering the main debate on TV and on talk shows.
Take David Harsanyi of The Denver Post. In a column from June Harsanyi tries to dissect the estimates of people who are uninsured. I don’t hear politicians pointing this out much:
According to the CBO, 45 percent of the uninsured are uninsured for four months or less, which seems like a pretty positive number to me.
Then, another portion of uninsured Americans already qualify for an existing government health insurance program — and government already controls 46 percent of spending on health care — for which they have not signed up.
The CBO estimates that as many as 15 percent of the chronically uninsured are already eligible for help. The Urban Institute (hardly advocates of free-market fundamentalism) found that 25 percent of the uninsured qualify for some program.
Surely, most citizens will concur that health care is too expensive (though most citizens would likely concur that everything is too expensive) and something should be done. So when Obama tells us that 46 million Americans are uninsured, he is implying that 46 million people can’t afford health insurance. That, too, is absurd.
In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Is Health Insurance Affordable for the Uninsured?,” Stanford economists say that “based on a plausible range of definitions and assumptions . . . health insurance is affordable for between one quarter and three quarters of adults who are not insured.”
Turns out that 8.4 million uninsured Americans are making $50,000 to $74,999 and 9.1 million more are making more than $75,000. Health insurance is just incompatible with their lifestyles, I guess.
And take these numbers from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office:
The commonly cited estimate of 40 million uninsured comes from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). Based on a large nationally representative sample, the CPS has been collecting data on health insurance status since 1980.
Although the CPS is intended to measure the number of people who lack health coverage for a whole year, its estimate more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point in time during the year. Data from three federally sponsored national surveys–the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)–yield estimates of the number of uninsured at a particular point in time that are very similar to the CPS estimate of about 40 million (see Summary Figure 1). In contrast, data from SIPP and MEPS indicate that 21 million to 31 million people are uninsured for an entire year.
Still, even as recent as September 10, 2009, the Census Bureau sticks to their numbers:
- The number of people with health insurance increased from 253.4 million in 2007 to 255.1 million in 2008.
- The number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008.
- Between 2007 and 2008, the number of people covered by private health insurance decreased from 202.0 million to 201.0 million, while the number covered by government health insurance climbed from 83.0 million to 87.4 million. The number covered by employment-based health insurance declined from 177.4 million to 176.3 million.
- The number of uninsured children declined from 8.1 million (11.0 percent) in 2007 to 7.3 million (9.9 percent) in 2008. Both the uninsured rate and number of uninsured children are the lowest since 1987, the first year that comparable health insurance data were collected.
- Although the uninsured rate for children in poverty declined from 17.6 percent in 2007 to 15.7 percent in 2008, children in poverty were more likely to be uninsured than all children.
What no one denies though is that our health care does need to be reformed. The U.S. spends the most on health care in the world yet the World Health Organization ranks us 37 out of191 countries based on our performance. People are denied important procedures due to ridiculous pre-existing conditions. I think maybe it’s time we modernize with the rest of the first-world countries.
The commonly cited estimate of 40 million uninsured comes from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). Based on a large nationally representative sample, the CPS has been collecting data on health insurance status since 1980.
Although the CPS is intended to measure the number of people who lack health coverage for a whole year, its estimate more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point in time during the year. Data from three federally sponsored national surveys–the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)–yield estimates of the number of uninsured at a particular point in time that are very similar to the CPS estimate of about 40 million (see Summary Figure 1). In contrast, data from SIPP and MEPS indicate that 21 million to 31 million people are uninsured for an entire year.
MoveOn Rally for Health care in Denver Tomorrow
MoveOn in Denver is going to be holding a rally for health care reform tomorrow. Here are the details:
Big insurance is fighting to stop real health care reform. Tomorrow, we’re gathering at rallies nationwide to send a strong message that we’re sick of Big Insurance–and we demand a public health insurance option, now!
Where: Triangle Park 7th and Lincon (in Denver)
When: Tuesday September 22nd at 12:00 PM
What: We’ll hear stories from individuals who are suffering under our broken health care system, and deliver a letter to Big Insurance, demanding that they stop denying us care.
President Obama ‘happy to look at’ newspaper legislation
From Romenesko at Poynter.org:
The president told Dave Murray that “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.” He added: “What I hope is that people start understanding if you’re getting your newspaper over the Internet, that’s not free and there’s got to be a way to find a business model that supports that.”
Despite this being the industry I’m going to work in, I’m tired of the bailouts. Plus newspapers got themselves into this mess, they have to buck up, innovate nd dig themselves out. To start editors and publishers should start listening to their younger employees on how to be up to speed with technology. We shouldn’t be rewarding bad business practices by bailing out every ailing industry. I do agree with the president that the industry has become more opinion than fact.
The Rocky Net 